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Chainmail

Chainmail is an ancient form of armour, popular throughout history with mighty warriors and nerds

Just The Facts

Chainmail has existed since at least the 4th century BC

Chainmail is almost impossible to penetrate with cutting or piercing weapons

Being surrounded by thousands of metal rings that can stop a sword is bitchin cool!

Two words: Chainmail. Bikinis.

Chainmail is a cheap, highly effective means of protection against zombie bites

History of chainmail

Chainmail has been around since at least the 4th century B.C. where it was used by the Celts, who are well known for their badassery. The Romans encountered it fighting the Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul and decided "Holy crap, we need to make this stuff standard issue for all our soldiers!" at which point chainmail became the armor of choice for the Legions for several centuries.

Chainmail was the most popular form of armor in the West right up until the 13th Century when platemail began to take over. Even though platemail was more popular, people still wore chainmail underneath it to cover vital areas for when fucking platemail failed! If something is awesome enough to be used as backup protection for solid metal plates, it's got to have an awesomeness level of at least 7 or 8 out 10.

Making Chainmail

Making chainmail is a gruelling, time consuming process. Assuming you have a whole pile of rings ready, the process for chainmailing is as follows:

Step 1: Open a ring.
Step 2: Loop that ring through several others.
Step 3: Close ring.

All in all, the process for a single, unwelded/unriveted ring can take between 5 and 7 seconds. This might not sound like much, but when you realize that a single piece of armour can contain more than 30,000 rings you begin to see what a mind numbingly drawn out process chainmailing is. Only the most masochistic or obsessive person should undertake a large-scale project, and only the most insane of people would ever want to work on this as a full-time job. Seriously, don't do it. You'll end up like an obsessive MMORPG player, except even they would mock you for the way you spend your time. If you want a suit of armour, for the love of coffee, buy it from a professional. You can take the hours of your life you would have sunk into opening and closes tiny metal rings and apply them to writing a book, solving world hunger, or (most likely) playing video games and eating junk food.

Chainmail in the modern age

Due largely in part to the lack of sword-wielding bandits and the invention of firearms (which treat most ancient body armour the same way a stalker treats a restraining order) chainmail has fallen out of favour as a form of personal protection. However, in recent decades chainmail has seen a resurgence of popularity in the form of costumes and jewellery, which is a massive drop in manliness levels from the days when it was all that stood between a soldier and sword-induced-death.

By far the greatest form chainmail has taken in the modern age is the chainmail bikini:

Chainmail Bikini by Utopia Armoury

CHAINMAIL. BIKINIS. What else do you need to know? They combine boobs with armour. The only way they could be more awesome is if they dispensed free booze and wads of cash.

It's tempting to just end the topic here, it doesn't get much better than chainmail bikinis, but we at Cracked like to think of ourselves as more thorough than that. Chainmail as part of fashion or costumes is also fairly popular, especially among people into fantasy and roleplaying. Also, people who are into bondage.

Chainmail on girls is hot. Even if not in bikini form

Another, more practical use of chainmail is zombie protection. Human jaws cannot bite through steel, especially not rottings jaws. A good set of chainmail armour can protect you from nearly 100% of zombies bites, making it perfect for those close encounters. People whose weapon of choice is a sword, bat, or other melee weapon should always have a suit of armour when battling the undead. Really, everyone should wear some, it prevents being infected when zombies manage to surprise you. If the zombie apocalypse occurs and you find yourself turning, don't blame us. You've been alerted to the existence of zombie-defying protection, in the form of tens of thousands of steel rings, if you die of an easily preventable zombie bite you can only blame yourself... until you become zombified and lose your higher cognitive functioning, then you wont be able to blame anyone.